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Few weeks back there was a lot of tension on LB. Corporation and Traffic Police were removing some shops that had taken up space on the footpath. Most of us find it difficult to see something being torn down no matter how justified. There were tens of police and officials with giant machines and lorries.The air is thick with tension.

I stood there with some engineering diagrams in hand, one elderly gentleman, presumably a member of the middle class, approached me. He asked if I was involved in the project. I said yes, we designed and prepared the engineering documents.

He then proceeded to advise. He said he had seen the footpath coming out, on to the road, around various encroachments, including the temple at the BSNL/Shastri Nagar junction. He said we were encouraging encroachments and reducing space for cars/traffic. Also that we should meet the Assistant Commissioner of the Zone X and discuss this with him.

My first reaction was irritation. As such everyone there were tense. Imagine being accused of promoting encroachment when serious demolitions were happening just a few meters away! I tried explaining that the work is still in progress. That we are very sympathetic to the plight of the hawkers and their livelihood and that we have tried our best to make sure both pedestrians and hawkers/shops are accommodated, etc. The design job on a corridor like LB is, as you can imagine, not easy. Many competing interests, ground reality very different from what we design sitting in an office, etc. It has taken a lot of walking, literally, on site and from one department to another, to get it even remotely right.

(Importantly, most, most importantly, the final say on any design, implementation, demolition and construction is with the city authorities. Not with some NGOwalla or some other citizens. And that is the way it should be. Lest you the reader get the wrong ideas.)

Few seconds later, I told myself – no one asked Chennai City Connect to do anything. We are doing all this voluntarily, to make the city a better place. If you volunteer, you have to take the good and the bad that comes with it, including the criticism. Getting defensive, offensive …. self pity or irritation has no place in this. If you are willing to enjoy the glowing quotes and pictures in the newspaper, you should be ready to enjoy the criticisms too.

But the most interesting, and most vexing, point is the difference in focus of various groups. Ask any middle class person about footpath and he will immediately  start complaining about encroachments and insist that all encroachers  should be removed, including hawkers. There is an underlying resentment in the middle class heart that someone somewhere is getting away with encroachment. This anger is usually directed most at the most visible of the “encroachers” – the pookaris and pazhakharans.

To make a bigger point of this small incident, that is the tragedy of our urban scene. Hawkers are first and foremost serving, including us the middle class. Also, they are earning a living, thereby not becoming a burden on us, if that is your concern.

But point taken, that that does not mean they can sit anywhere they want, especially obstructing pedestrians. But where else do they go ? I would argue this is the biggest failure of our urban planning, especially at a micro level. There are enough national and international policies on hawking, etc. All written in sympathetic tones. But these are at best guidelines, and at worst useless, unless the issue is dealt with on a micro level – the LB level. Creating space for commerce by hawking, side by side with pedestrian space, while ensuring hawkers and shops don’t encroach into walking space, is the real challenge.

I am sure, when the LB project is done and inaugurated, one criticism will be that we have not demanded more demolitions. I would argue that if  LB is a success at all, even in a small way,  this precisely would be the reason. Being sensitive to the fact that your design could destroy someones livelihood should be at the core of the project. This does not mean compromising on space for pedestrian or traffic management, for that matter. My experience, short experience, is that designing demolition is easier, accommodating is far tougher, and smarter.

Also, imagine if we had started this project many months ago, by repeatedly harping on all the demolitions we expect Corporation to accomplish, even before they saw any value in this project, would it have come this far ?

I hope to write a blog soon titled “How to tame your encroachment”, about how encroachment demolitions need a context to succeed.